You should be okay now building with the latest versions of each package. Trial and error will tell (I build directly from the git tree and all is currently good). If you haven't already seen, here are the general instructions for building Xfce.

I was unable to see that 4.13 is a development branch. Where is the info on that please?

Plus exo and garcon and a number of other packages don't use 4.12 or 4.13 release numbers.

Yeah, the version numbers don't all match up. If you're building based on the latest released version of each package (tarball) it should be easy - just grab the latest version. If you're trying to target a specific date or specific version in the past, look at the dates of the tar files and try to match them up.

It would also be useful to subscribe to the Xfce-announce and Xfce4-dev mailing lists to get notification of releases and general development chatter. As well as joining the #xfce-dev IRC channel.

Re: [SOLVED] How to find out compatible stable releases?

Hi and thanks for the breadth of replies

I failed to read the docs page that says

If the minor version is an even number, this means that it is a stable release

trivia####I am reluctant to use git so that my build script is "reproducible" so must use release packages. But based on your excellent replyI will do the reading and go back to my original plans of using my download page but this time avoid dev packages.

thanks again for the heads up, I have marked this SOLVED and hope all goes well for you for the balance of 2018